a long list of foods Axel has refused and a shorter list of foods eaten in the last three days

Refused:

blini
omlette
sausage cutlet
black bread
breaded, fried fish
meusli
carrot salad
beet salad
almond butter sandwich
blini with jam
fried egg
meatloaf cutlet
more bread
vermicelli with cheese
kefir
banana
orange
apple
oatmeal
tangerine
tvorog
cake
bread again
more pasta with cheese
grilled cheese

Eaten:

cookies
sugar cube (2)
milk
kefir (three sips)
jam from the package
cookies
nori crackers
2 bowls of oatmeal (one morning)
more cookies
more cookies
5/6th meat pie

six kinds of cabbage

We went to the market today, a trip of raised expectations and dashed hopes for both of us. The market little resembles US farmers' markets or French produce markets. But our hopes were dashed by far more innocuous reasons: to begin, while our apartment is quite lovely (in a guady, contemporized Louis Quatorze kind of way), it lacks a functioning kitchen. I asked for a stove and got two electric burners and a microwave. Complicating factors are a complete lack of bowls, no knives or cutting board, and a dearth of cookware. This made the market trip an exercise in restraint.

The market itself wasn't obvious to the untrained eye--no tarp-covered stalls to indicate a market, no french-style arcade. But from some memory pocket, I recognized the little footpath between a row of permanent kiosks and we followed it into the market itself. The main part of the market is indoors: rows and rows of stalls, a random arrangement which puts vegetables next to cookies next to dried sausages, or fruit or cookies. Save for the cookie stalls, which were vast spreads of at least fifty different cookies sold by the gram (and, curiously, each of the many cookie stalls sold exactly the same variety, displayed in more or less exactly the same manner as the other cookie stalls), the stalls sold a haphazard assortment of dairy, produce, meat or packages goods. While some stalls seemed to be primarily one product, most sold other items alongside.

The cookies stalls were the site of Axel's dashed hopes and expectations. He immediately recognized the cookie that he'd been given the day before by the nice bank ladies, during our long attempt to get Ukrainian cash. He pointed them out, told me that he wanted "bank cookies," and gripped the bag of cookies tightly the whole morning. But the treat I got for him--a "keiks," which seemed more like a muffin, was a complete bomb (and which later he mixed it in with his macaroni and cheese at lunch).

Other than that, the market was great: we watched a man clean and gut a fish bigger than Axel, while others flopped about in what looked like gas canisters. The flying scales mingled with the falling snow; blood gushed off the plywood counter into the dirty slush below. Inside the market, a guy hacked at a hunk of meat with an enormous ax, bits of animal flying off the blade. A trio of matrons, wrapped in aprons and headscarves, shoved pen-knives with slices of dried sausage at us. A woman, in a heavy coat and sultry eye-shadow huskily offered us honey. More aprons offered me tvorog (like farm cheese) for my child (who wanted nothing to do with it once we got home). Stacks and stacks of eggs--in shades of light brown to pale ivory, tempted, but I couldn't figure out how to get them home in my bag. Barrels lined with plastic bags held at least seven kinds of pickled cabbages; pickled cucumbers, apples and some other large, round fruit filled three-foot tall glass jars. Tiny, fresh pasta shapes, bags of dried pastas, grains, kasha (the hot breakfast cereal), even meusli was available. Cans held preserved meats, fish and various vegetables, while bags contained milk, yogurt and preserved fish. We could get carrots, straight from the ground or presliced in miniscule matchsticks, beets, fennel, tiny onions and shallots, rutabega (which I can recognize now thanks to last week's CSA), leeks, cilantro, chives, and many, many varieties of cabbage. Stacks of tiny, perfect tangerines, oranges, apples, bananas, kiwis, even hachaya persimmons were available. It was a dream; I walked through the market wondering whether Mychal would be up to the task of cooking any of it on two electric burners.

The market was a mix of accents; Ukrainian was the language of commerce, but Russian, Georgian and others which I didn't recognize (Ossetian?) were spoken behind the stalls. I got by with Russian, and some Ukrainian politesses thrown in.

We came home with three perfect tangerines, two apples, a small black cabbage, two perfect persian cucumbers, 100 grams of tvorog, two kinds of cookies and a keik plus water for 20 hryvnia: $2.38USD.

And for lunch, Axel had milk and cookies again.

milk and cookies

(Clothes-free Axel in our very warm Lviv apartment.)

This morning I was finally able to get some money (after three failed ATM attempts). For some reason my cards aren't working (don't? will never? work) in the ATM machines here. It made for a rather lean lunch, dinner and breakfast the day before (and an especially trying cashless three-hour wait in the Kyiv airport), but we persevered. On five kinds of starch.

Getting money turned out to be yet another test of a certain sleep-deprived person's patience. Even at the foreign currency exchange (of which there are so many in the small area of Lviv that we walked today, a strange largess in comparison to the one (!) for the entire Berkeley-Oakland area), it took the kind ladies several attempts and phone calls to get my card accepted; and then I had to buy dollars and change them to hryvnia. I was beginning to sweat our lack of funds a bit, because it was well after noon and I had nothing (nothing!) to feed my child. It was a trifle harrowing for me, but I shouldn't have worried: Axel, pissed off because the cafeteria-style restaurant did not have milk, refused to have anything to do with the nice blini and cutlet and egg and bread and cheese that I put in front of him. He managed to hold out until we found the bakery, where I stocked up on two kinds of cookies (sushki and jam-filled tiny planks, whose name I don't know).

And also standbys, just as I remembered them from years ago: vermicelli noodles, black bread, kefir, and smetana, each of which earned only passing interest from Axel. So it's been cookies and milk for him today.

a brief tally of the number of fits Axel has pitched since we left

37

But the only culture specific one was over the sushki: these small, hard cookies resemble bagels and are looped on a piece of string, sold as a wreath. Axel was pissed that we had to break the cookie to get if off the string, he wanted it whole.

Instead of German efficiency

Nothing in Terminal A of the Kyiv Boryspil Airport inspired confidence. Two hundred passengers milled about in the cavernous, smokey, concrete-floored waiting room, gathering in small clusters around enormous piles of baggage, huge, bulging, saran-wrapped suitcases, toddler-size boxes with pictures of beefy, toy 4-wheelers, young ladies teetering on four-inch heels in skirts of the same length, clutches of matrons barricaded within the fortress of their goods ate dried sausage off the knife or roughly-cut bread. There was nobody at the check-in desks, nothing posted on the information boards, no indication whatsoever whether or which flight would board. We had three hours to wait before our flight. The first hour, Axel ate through our bag of beef jerky, cheese crackers, fig cookies, oyster crackers, and pretzels. When he finished, as if informed by sonar, people began to queue at one of the destinationless check-in counters. I picked up Axel, loaded as many of the five bags onto the stroller as possible, and hurried to get in the line. My instincts were lucky--we managed to get in fourth place, ahead of the hundred-plus other passengers (Fifty of the more hitryi economy class crammed into the First-Class line).

Check-in took about a minute, brief glance at our passports and we were sent to security, which, amazingly also took about a minute (nothing had to be taken out of or off bags and bodies), and we proceeded to another smokey, information-devoid waiting room. This one had windows at least. After another hour and a half, during which my former Axel emerged who slept in my arms for the whole time, we were informed in three languages that our flight was boarding. Three airline employees materialized, pushing their wheeled check-in stations in front of them, a crowd formed instantly around them and instantaneously the crowd was scanned and rushed out the doors into an unmarked bus. Which took us, helped by three other passengers (the first time of our entire trip that people helped), for a ten-minute drive (longer than the bus-ride to our hotel from the very same airport), to a tiny plane waiting on the ground. One elderly woman whisked Axel out of my arms and into the plane, a man took over the stroller, a nicely dressed woman made off with Axel's Thomas suitcase, and I followed after with the rest. About a minute of instructions in Ukrainian and what I am supposed to believe was English (I'm sorry, but it was absolutely incomprehensible), the stewardesses ignored the still (can you believe it?) sleeping Axel in my arms, (unlike the first two flights, where the hysterical child was firmly informed by the steward collective that he had to be buckled in the purchased seat), up and down without any service interruption, we landed, people massed out, again grabbing whatever piece of our entourage they could, we were met at the plane by two people who pointed us at a bus, sat in seats, driven a block or so to another truck holding all of our checked-baggage. Again, the crowd massed, picked up all our stuff and carried us through the doors of a building and out onto the street. It was the quickest, most-efficient travel by plane that I have ever experienced in my entire life.

calling home

(Axel watching the airplanes land 200 meters from our hotel room balcony.)

We spent our first night in the "Boryspil" Airport hotel (which is not to be confused with the Boryspil "Airport" hotel). I had reserved a single, which in Eastern European hotels means exactly that: a single, dorm-room size bed. Which was surfeit space anyway (see previous post). Axel spent most of the night playing with his new toys and climbing out of the bed. I spent most of the night fetching Axel's books which kept slipping between the mattress and the wall and praying.

Axel slept from just past midnight to just past four that night; and by 6am I gave up all hope of more sleep and trundled us off to breakfast, which I'm still thinking about a couple days later. I remember my first breakfast in Moscow, nineteen years ago. We all thought it so strange, the thick slice of dark bread with an equally thick slice of butter, accompanied by cold cuts and cold beet salad, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and salt. This morning, it all looked so familiar, with slight image updates: the composed salads were mandolin-thin, the butter do-it-yourself, the cold cuts thin shaves of ham, rather than the thick, fat-laced kielbasa. That was only a third of the offering at "Boryspil" hotel, and since we had a lot of time to kill, I helped myself to one of everything: blini, eggs, meat cutlet, battered fish, sausages, cold beet salad, carrot salad, cabbage salad, olives, ham, dried sausage, meusli, kefir, sliced fruit... I'm forgetting a few dishes.

Breakfast only took up half an hour of the eight before our flight. After that, I took Axel for a walk in the snow (10 minutes, he refused to even touch it with his shoe), tried to use the ATM (5 minutes, as someone cut ahead of me in line and then card malfunction), took Axel out on the balcony (four times at 3 minutes each), and then listened while he played with the hotel phone (three hours). Pushing the buttons, he informed me he "put Daddy on speaker," so that he could tell him about the "snow airport" (Munchen, where we spent two peaceable hours pulling the wheeled suitcase along the fast(er than the US) moving sidewalks. (This did involve a few Chaplin-style full body falls.) "I having a nice trip," he told daddy over the insistent beeping dial tone. We had to check-out at noon, which gave us not quite enough time to get into Kyiv and back and left us three hours to kill before our flight (with nowhere to leave our bags). Terrible planning, but given our 11pm arrival the night before, there was no earlier flight to take for Lviv.

midnight snacks

A list of the things Axel and I have consumed in the dark since we arrived:

fig cookies and cheese crackers in the middle of our night flight
raisins in bed at 4am in "Boryspil" hotel
nori crackers for a dusky dinner in our Lviv apartment
midnight snack the first night in our Lviv apartment: oyster crackers, nori crackers and pretzels

sleepless over the pond

(Axel checking out the bassinet on our plane, for which he was 3 kilograms overweight.)

Two nights before we left, Axel woke up eight times before 4am. Mychal had left that morning for his work trip, so I had to muster the wherewithall to get down the steps and to Axel's room eight times in a row. By 5am, after having spent the entire night trying to soothe a fit-throwing and hysterical toddler, I turned off the monitor and gave up. Eventually Axel must have gone to sleep, because when I came downstairs two hours later, totally refreshed, he was asleep.

Needless to say, that night was nothing compared to the horror of our red-eye flight. My vision of Axel as a seasoned, easy-going traveler, and myself as the uber-competent mother of such a cosmopolitan, exploded in the hands of that fit-throwing, hysterical toddler. It was awful. Beyond awful even. I wanted to cry. And hand Axel off to the stewardesses.

But the lovely Germans would have none of it (we flew Lufthansa). They scarcely acknowledged us, some sort of professional self-preservation, I have to think. So Axel thrashed and harangued, throwing his 34 pounds liberally across our seats and into the aisles. Which only wore him out the equivalent of a one-hour nap and gave me twin rug burns on my forearms from lunging across the seat to catch him. Sadly, my attempt at translating "A two-year old is the best natural birth control!" for our German seat-mates was muddled.

Especially since that night was just the preview of what was to come the next two nights. All I'm going to say about that is that by the time woke up in Lviv, three days later, Axel had slept a cumulative 11 hours. Not pretty.

Going for first

Setting my goals for this year was easy--all I had to do was pick up last year's list and change the "8" into a "9". First on my list was relocating my sense of humor. That didn't happen. I was mostly aiming to lose some of the sentimentality that I'd been carrying around since I had Axel. That was a doomed effort: if not worse, I'm no more thick-skinned at the end of 08 than I was at the beginning.

Next on my list were training goals--specific times for certain events, and a blanket-clause "first place" for everything else. Of course, I didn't meet all of those goals, though I did manage some second places.
Last on my list was finishing my dissertation, which hardly counts, because it's been on my list for a couple of years running.

This year, I'm simply reversing the order. First up is finishing the dissertation; second, going for first in my races; third, hardening the eff up. Conveniently, I'm already a portion of the way there, having gotten first in my age group in a local, extremely non-competitive 10K. The competition was further weeded out by the gale force winds and dumping rain, but I'll take it. Mychal got me new racing flats, so I also managed to take 2 minutes off my personal best, the same amount I took off a half-marathon two weeks earlier. (I'm not sure what that signifies, mathematically.)

Finishing the dissertation really means to me that I have to prioritize it over everything else (excepting, of course, a certain tow-head). In other words, training has been coming last while I bang(ed) out my final chapters. It's working--I'm most of the way through the damn thing, but I haven't biked once this year (!), and I haven't even maintained a weekly presence in the pool. This month that will be put to an even more extreme test--we'll all be in Ukraine, where snow covers the ground and the mercury hovers around 30º and the Laney pool is a few thousand miles away.

It'll be difficult to meet my third goal here--htfu, that is, because this trip is steeped in all sorts of sentimentalities. I haven't been back to Ukraine since I spent a year there in 1990; we're going now to "make up" for the trip that was supposed to happen the fall Axel was born; we'll all be here together, the first visit to Eastern Europe for both Mychal and Axel.